Nearly 100 wealthy families and power couples contributed at least $100,000 each to help Barack Obama over the past two years, creating an elite set of donors to whom the president-elect repeatedly turned in financing his campaign, transition and inauguration, a Washington Post analysis shows.
John McCain, after pushing trough campaign finance reform and tying his hands behind his back by campaigning on public financing funds, lost big:
The ability to direct such large sums to a presidential candidate stems in part from the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation. The law banned unlimited “soft money” donations, but it increased the amount individuals can steer to presidential candidates by allowing them to donate directly to a campaign as well as to state and national political parties to help elect a candidate.
Under the law, the maximum amount an individual can give in a presidential election year has gone from $25,000 to $70,100 over the past five years. And by creating joint fundraising committees — allowing donors to give the maximum to all three funding pools at once — campaigns have become much more efficient in collecting the donations.
Not that the Obama campaign is giving up on small donors. People are still getting weekly or almost-weekly emails asking for $5 donations.
Let this be a lesson to you, Republicans.
A few items of note:
Separatist? PBS Can’t Call a Terrorist a Terrorist
On taxpayer-funded PBS, reporters have a difficult time using words like “terrorist” to describe politically motivated bombers – even when Democratic officials have no problem using the term. On Thursday night’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, describing controversial Clinton administration pardons, PBS’s Ray Suarez identified the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN as merely a “separatist organization,” even though in the soundbite that followed, Attorney General nominee Eric Holder clearly described the FALN as terrorists
130 bomb attacks during a period of nine years, six dead, and Suarez can’t get himself to call them terrorists. At least he didn’t refer to them as “political prisoners”, which is the meme among some.
Jersey Bites continues the food drive:
Shiny happy dhimmi – #9 is up, for Sunday Carnival goodness, and don’t miss Doug’s latest Larwyn’s Link Kerplosion.
Rich Ivory of Hip Hop Republican is blogging on the inauguration for the BBC
Beth is auctioning her photo on Ebay.
Via Maria, Lionel Bart’s sad life story
The disparity between what McCain and Obama had to spend is not quite as large as many have reported if you count what the RNC and DNC contributed to their respective campaigns. The best estimate that I’ve seen of the total amount spent is $550 million for McCain and $750 million for Obama. It’s still a significant difference, but not nearly as much as many have claimed (McCain got a lot more help from the RNC than Obama got from the DNC).